I’m Ashish. I build AI products and the teams that ship them.

For fifteen years I’ve done some version of the same job: take something that doesn’t exist yet (a telephony platform, a virtual try-on, a fleet of agents) and get it running reliably in front of real users. The technology keeps changing. The job, mostly, doesn’t.

These days I’m CTO and co-founder of Comify, where we’re building communication infrastructure that decides what to say, to whom, and when, not just how to deliver it. Before that I led AI and AR research at Lenskart, and before that I spent a decade at MyOperator going from founding engineer to Director of Technology while the company grew from its first customer to more than ten thousand.

The short version of the long story

I started out writing CRUD apps for clients at a small shop in 2011. Unglamorous. I learned a lot.

In 2012 I joined a tiny cloud-telephony startup then called VoiceTree, later MyOperator. I was employee-number-small. Over the next ten years I helped build two products from nothing, designed the architecture for a platform that peaked at 100+ servers and 99.9% uptime, and grew into leading a 30+ person engineering org. The project I’m proudest of from those years is CODAC: a phone-number-verification system for e-commerce that, at its peak, handled 10M+ calls a day and brought in around $12M a year. We ran it with a team of three. I learned more about distributed systems from keeping CODAC alive than from any book.

In 2022 I made a deliberate jump: from infrastructure to applied AI. I joined Lenskart to start an AI/AR research team, which on day one was just me. Within a year we’d shipped a virtual eyeglass try-on to millions of users that moved online revenue by about 9%. Then we kept going: real-time eyeglass removal on the live camera feed at 12+ FPS on an iPhone 12, contact-lens try-on, a GenAI photoshoot pipeline that took catalogue coverage from 73% to 100% in a month, and a 3D asset pipeline rebuilt around Blender automation. The team grew from 1 to 12.

In 2025 I co-founded Comify to build what I’d kept wishing existed: communication infrastructure with judgment. We move 50M+ messages a day across push and WhatsApp on a serverless backend, and we hand the parts that used to be a marketer’s full-time job (writing the copy, picking the audience, generating the creative) to agents that learn from what actually got clicked.

How I work

A few things I believe, mostly because I’ve been burned by the alternatives:

  • Stay close to the code. I’ve never been the kind of leader who stops building. My best architecture decisions came from having recently felt the pain myself. My worst came from a slide deck.
  • Tie it to a number. Uptime, revenue, cost, coverage, FPS: pick the one that matters and move it. “We modernized the stack” is not a result. “We replaced a vendor in a week and saved $800k a year” is.
  • The bill is part of the design. Scale is easy if you ignore cost. Doing 50M messages a day cheaply is the actual engineering problem.
  • Build-vs-buy is a decision, not a reflex. I’ve bought when buying was right and built when the vendor was the bottleneck. Knowing which is which is most of the job.
  • People stay when the work is good and the leadership is honest. At MyOperator I was told more than once that we had the lowest attrition in the company. I think that’s the achievement that compounds the most.

Beyond the day job

I tinker constantly. A digital-twin agent that produces fully automated talking-avatar news videos. Videofarm, an API-driven layout engine that generates video programmatically. SnapStitch, an apparel photoshoot app. An agentic development system built on Claude Code. A home-security setup running detection on a Raspberry Pi. A handful of small models I trained for fun and spite: audio anomaly detection, anger detection in speech, a custom text-to-speech voice.

Most of these will never be products. That’s fine. They’re how I keep my hands in the clay.

If any of this overlaps with what you’re working on, come say hi.